This project began as an attempt to find language that could explain my continuing fascination with popular music in the face of a notable lack of encouragement within academia to pursue that fascination. Not only did popular music have no place in the music curriculum, but the training I received seemed to make defending the viability of popular music an im possibility. Somehow, I/enew that the popular music I enjoyed was in no way less interesting than the classical music that both I and my teachers loved; yet the methods I was learning to describe, praise, discuss, and write about music gave me no vocabulary to describe the "interesting" qualities of popular music in the way that I could describe the counterpoint of J. S. Bach, the intricate harmonic plan and dramatic form of Beethoven, or the delicate orchestral nuances of Debussy, Mahler, and Stravinsky.

There is a well-developed vocabulary for discussing classical music, but when it comes to popular music, how do we analyze its effects and its meaning? David Brackett draws from the disciplines of cultural studies and music theory to demonstrate how listeners form opinions about popular songs and how they come to attribute a rich variety of meanings to them. Exploring several genres of popular music through recordings made by Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby, Hank Williams, James Brown, and Elvis Costello, Brackett develops a set of tools for looking at both the formal and the cultural dimensions of popular music of all kinds.

Preface

1 Introduction

  Prelude

  I. Codes and competences

  II. Who is the author?

  III. Musicology and popular music

  IV. Postlude

2 Family values in music? Billie Holiday's and Bing Crosby's

  "I'11 Be Seeing You"

  I. A tale of two (or three) recordings

  II. Critical discourse

  III. Biographical discourse

  IV. Style and history

  V. Performance, effect, and affect

3 When you're lookin' at Hank (you're looking at country)

  I. Lyrics, metanarratives, and the great authenticity debate

  II. Sound, performance, gender, and the honky-tonk

  III. "A feeling called the blues"

  IV. The emergence of "country-western"

4 James Brown's "Superbad" and the double-voiced utterance

  I. The discursive space of black music

  II. Signifyin(g)--words and performance

  III. Musical signifyin(g)

5 Writing, music, dancing, and architecture in Elvis Costello's

  "Pills and Soap"

  I. The "popular aesthetic"

  II. Style and aesthetics

  III. Interpretation and (post)modern pop

  IV. A question of influence

6 Afterword: the citizens of Simpleton

Appendix

  A. Reading the spectrum photos

  B. Registral terminology

Notes

Bibliography

Select discography

Index